Need for Proposed U.S. Public Service Academy Debated

George Washington couldn’t
make it happen. Nor could Thomas
Jefferson. But a self-described “nobody”
named Chris Myers Asch is
giving the idea of a national public-service
university another shot.

As envisioned by Mr. Asch, a
Teach For America veteran who’s
leading the effort to finance and
build what he’s calling the U.S.
Public Service Academy, it would
be patterned after the nation’s military
academies, offering a free,
four-year degree to students in exchange
for five years of postgraduate
work in the public sector.

Graduates could work in local,
state, or federal government, in
public schools or police departments,
or in other nonprofit, public-service-oriented organizations.

“This is a national need,” Mr.
Asch said in an interview, citing a
2001 Congressional Budget Office
report warning of potential personnel
shortages stemming from “the
aging of the federal workforce.” A
dramatic rise in the amount of
debt with which college students
now graduate is making government
service an increasingly unattractive
career option, he added.

“We need the best and brightest,”
Mr. Asch said.“We need a new generation
of young people to commit
themselves to public service.”

The proposal calls for a college of
about 5,100 students—most nominated
by lawmakers, as is the case
with the military-service academies—who would major in liberal
arts fields, with a focus on public
service and leadership.

Students would be required to
spend summers working as interns
with emergency-response teams,
the military, and charitable nonprofit
organizations. Foreign-languange
fluency and a minimum
eight-week term of study abroad
would also be mandatory.

School Called ‘Redundant’

As yet, the academy exists only
on paper, and that’s the only place
it might ever exist, to judge by the
firing-squad reception the idea got
from a panel of experts convened to
discuss it this week at the American
Enterprise Institute, a Washington
think tank.

“This is a bad idea, terribly well
advocated,” was the assessment of
Stephen J. Trachtenberg, a president
emeritus and professor of
public service at George Washington
University, who called the idea
“an answer in search of a problem”
and “redundant.”

“Harvard’s got the Kennedy
School, Syracuse’s got the
Maxwell School … and GW, bless
it, has the Trachtenberg School,”
said Mr. Trachtenberg, referring
to Harvard University’s John F.
Kennedy School of Government
in Cambridge, Mass.; Syracuse
University’s Maxwell School of
Citizenship and Public Affairs in
Syracuse, N.Y.; and his namesake
Trachtenberg School of
Public Policy and Public Administration
at George Washington
University here.

“The fact of the matter is, we can
buy people with training” from existing
schools, he argued.

Seconding that view, Philip I.
Levy, an AEI resident scholar, cited
the academy’s proposed $205 million
annual price tag, 80 percent of
which would be taxpayer-funded.
“One could do something like a
scholarship program that would
meet many of these needs and be
much less expensive,” he said.

Still, the idea may stand a better
chance than it has in centuries
past. Bills have been introduced in
both the U.S. House of Representatives
and the Senate, where it is
sponsored by Democratic presidential
hopeful Sen. Hillary Rodham
Clinton of New York.

Mr. Asch said 16 senators and 93
House members have signed on as
co-sponsors, and that Republican
presidential candidate and former
Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee also
has endorsed the idea.

“In the midst of a campaign season,
we think that there’s ample
room for the candidates to embrace
this idea in a new administration,”
Mr. Asch said.

Panelist John Bridgeland, the
chief executive officer of Civic Enterprises,
a Washington-based firm
that advises on public policy, called
Mr. Asch “a modern George Washington,”
for his idea. Even Mr.
Bridgeland, though, suggested that
the idea of a brick-and-mortar
academy be scrapped in favor of a
consortium of existing public-service
programs.

But Mr. Asch, who was also on
the panel, said a stand-alone
academy was necessary to inspire
esprit de corps among its
students, and “to make public
service cool again.”

“When you set foot at West
Point or Annapolis, you know
you’re somewhere different,” he
said, referring to the United
States Military Academy in West
Point, N.Y., and the United
States Naval Academy in Annapolis,
Md. “We want to do the
same thing for public service.”

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